Short Videos, Big Impact: What TikTok and Instagram Revealed About Europe's Political Future

By Emilia Palonen, Alexander Alekseev, Kleber Carrilho and Vaibhav Agarwal

The last European Parliament election took place across the European Union from 6 to 9 June 2024. The overall turnout was 50.74%, a slight increase from the 50.66% turnout in the 2019 elections. CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2024 - Source : EP.

Social media platforms play an essential role in shaping public debate in Europe. They are far less static than traditional forms of media. Instead, they are algorithm-driven ecosystems in constant flux. More recently, political communication has moved to audiovisual form. As social media feeds play a role in shaping opinions, especially in times of political events like elections, we decided to find ways to analyse this kind of content.

Although gathering data is no less important than analysing it to get results, we can already say that audiovisual platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok turned increasingly political even before major shifts in corporate policies in the wake of the 2024 US presidential election.

CO3 researchers studied audiovisual content on social media in a veritable team effort, in collaboration with the PLEDGE Horizon consortium and another HEPP research group project  ENDURE. We also got help from the MORES Horizon consortium. Aided by a dozen-person support staff at the University of Helsinki, thirty researchers spent four weeks in May-June 2024 gathering data on TikTok and Instagram to explore how short video platforms shape political discourse in ten European countries during the European Parliament elections.

The study went beyond the usual means in data collection. Besides collecting data from official accounts of political parties, leaders, candidates, and key media outlets’ accounts on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, we used an experimental methodology. We created user profiles, mimicking three different political leanings (Far-Right, Centre-Right, and Left-Green), to review different kinds of political content on TikTok and Instagram. As a control, each researcher also used an organic account. In addition, the researchers wrote notes on what they saw every day.

These ethnographic observations captured their impressions, memories, and interpretations, adding a crucial human perspective to the dataset.

The study was conducted in ten countries across Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. We learned that irrespective of the country, any user could fairly easily customise their feed according to their political preferences (in our case, Far-Right, Center-Right, and Left-Green). We also learned that on TikTok, algorithms bring political content into users’ feeds much faster than on Instagram.

Interestingly, Centre-Right content, particularly linked to the European People’s Party, was very prominent across the feeds with different political leanings. In this way, the data we gathered even before the election well reflected the rightward shift in European politics and the European Parliament, shaping the future of the European Union until 2029.

The researchers also listed the topics they often saw in the videos, which revealed that videos on the economy and Social Europe very often appeared in the feeds of the researchers’ politicised accounts across Europe, regardless of their political leanings. In addition to this, the researchers responsible for Centre-Right and Far-Right politicised accounts pointed out that many videos they saw dealt with migration and defence.

In other words, we can observe that in comparison with the previous European election, the Centre-Right moved significantly rightwards, engaging with the topics that the Far-Right has long tried to monopolise. Meanwhile, the researchers responsible for Left-Green politicised accounts noted that in addition to the economy and Social Europe, videos in the feeds also touched upon such topics as the Green Deal and gender. The study also allows us to see changes in the visibility of topics over time, and how fast political content appeared in the feeds in the first place.

External, non-EU players—not only the US and the UK but also Russia and China—were very visible in videos in the feeds of politicised accounts across the political spectrum. The international dimension turned out to be very important as ongoing military conflicts—in Ukraine and Gaza in particular—served as a backdrop for political debates online.

In other words, the very process of data gathering already provided the researchers with valuable insights into the rapidly changing political landscapes on audiovisual social media platforms. As we prepare the dataset on the 2024 European Parliament elections for a deeper analysis, we learn more about the growing power of social media in structuring political communication and, in many respects, the very politics today.